Back to nature.

We left Darwin with a little reluctance, but the draw of delights to come was equally strong. Next call was into Litchfield NP. A small park compared with Kakadu, it nevertheless packs a lot into a small area. Just 120 or so kilometres from Darwin it is abreast of a north-facing escarpment, with many creeks and streams cutting their way down to the saltwater crocodiles below! Safe as it is from those beasts, there are many rock pools with falls that tumble and cascade and gurgle from hole to hole. Many filled with tourists like us, but it doesn’t distract. Here, on the plateau, we crossed our first deep creeks both with and without the trailer. You can’t help but approach these challenges with some trepidation, because we are on our own and there are some disadvantages to testing the depth of a creek personally, up this end of the country. But the Prado waded through the 75cms on offer without much fuss, for distances of 50 metres or more; just a slightly sticky starter solenoid the following morning. The walks to one or two of the falls were quite long, through some wonderful glades and along rocky steam beds. We encountered an Olive python about 2.2 metres long, stationary beside the path, playing a waiting game with us. Such beautiful creatures.

Perhaps a little highlight was the cry from the ladies loo at Tjaynera Falls on Sandy Creek, where the tap body had freed itself from its housing and there was Helen holding back the arcing floodwaters as best she could. Bringing my trusty tool box I was able, within only a minute or two, to clean the tap assembly of mud (it evidently spends much of each wet season well below the water mark), check the washer, and reassemble, while the queue of grateful if a little uncomfortable ladies outside brought a smile to the eyes!

After Litchfield we continued south back past Pine Creek where we had turned east earlier in our travels. We stopped at Leliyn (Edith Falls) back in the Nitmiluk (Katherine) NP and sampled further walks to even more remarkable pools, before returning the next day to Katherine. At last. Now we headed west away from the north-south axis of nearly all of our travels so far. With the sun now on the driver’s quarter all day we splurged on some air conditioning. You wouldn’t credit it really, but our work ethic upbringings require that we suffer a little for the sake of economy, but not too much. I suppose it is worth an extra litre each hundred miles to stay cool. Not such a big deal really.

On our way to the WA border we had Gregory and Keep NPs lined up. At Gregory we drove 50 kms in to Bullita Homestead, originally one of the Durack outstations of their properties from the earliest days of pastoralism here in the far north. The tales of hardship are amazing, with major flooding taking the original wood and grass homestead away back in the 1920s,and again in the early 1970s along with stock and everything else that wasn’t bolted down. Read “Kings in grass castles”, by Mary Durack. It tells of the cattle her grandfather drove from east Queensland through Coopers Creek and on to the Kimberly. A pastoral empire grew out of those efforts that came to embrace such an enormous area – was it a million sq. kms? Gregory is where the landscape is terraced in stepped layers of limestone that we had not seen before. Tufa dams and calcite deposits in the stream beds and overfalls give the impression of a torrent of water where there is none. We stopped in Timber Creek for the night, bumped into an architect graduate of my university in Edinburgh, and outlaid some serious money to go on the Victoria River cruise. Forty kilometres of fast boating down one of Australia’s most impressive large rivers, with many crocs, fish eagles, and wild life along the shoreline. The freshwater croc that was lazing 20 metres from us at our camp raised the BP a little next morning!

Keep NP delighted perhaps most of all. Easily accessible and small in scale, there are good walks through inspiring layered sandstone. Under the first overcast skies we’ve seen, the Gurrandalng walk along the Keep River to the rock art site at Jinimum was especially rewarding, especially when you push on a little beyond the end of the trail. This made up a little for the main rock art site being closed. And spotting 2 brolgas at last, arriving honking from trees at Cockatoo lagoon topped it all off.